So you re only halfway through your homework and the Director of the FBI keeps texting you for help What do you do? Save your grade? Or save the country? If you re Florian Bates, you figure out a way to do both.

Featuring the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai-degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and general knave-about-Piccadilly-Something Nasty In the Woodshed is, chronologically, the third in the Mortdecai trilogy, after Don't Point That Thing at Me and After You With the Pistol, although written second. The players are, once again, Charlie, Johanna, and Jock (the thuggish anti-Jeeves), and there is plenty of liquor,...

As owner of the Crewel World needlework shop and part-time sleuth, Betsy Devonshire has become skilled at weaving suspicious threads together. Just back from a trip to Thailand, Doris Valentine is eager to show her stitching friends her souvenirs, which includes dazzling Thai silk. She also has a small stone Buddha that she agreed to deliver to an antique store in St. Paul. It's wrapped in a dirty rag, which she throws away. When she meets the dealer,...

"Mr Mortdecai, why do you suppose I and my superiors have preserved you from death at very very great trouble and expense?†? Charlie Mortdecai-degenerate aristocrat and victim of his own larceny and licentiousness-has no idea. Until it is made clear to him that he must marry the beautiful, sex-crazed and very, very rich Johanna Krampf. The fly in the ointment is that Johanna thinks nothing of involving poor Charlie in her life-threatening schemes...

Joe Gunther, a Brattleboro, Vermont, cop, is the head of the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI), a joint task force charged with statewide responsibility for major crimes. In The Marble Mask, the VBI's first case takes the force north to Stowe, where a fifty-year-old corpse has turned up in a crevasse on Mt. Mansfield. Some of the more interesting minor characters in author Archer Mayor's long-running series about the amiable elder sleuth make...

Between Parker's 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990's, the world of crime changed considerably. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital—the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone. Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana "hunting lodge" where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery

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A group of teenagers uses their combined talents to re-steal several priceless paintings and save fifteen-year-old Kat Bishop's father, himself an international art thief, from a vengeful collector

FBI art-crimes expert Emma Sharpe and deep-cover agent Colin Donovan are recuperating in Heron's Cove when they learn of a rare set of Russian jewelry that's about to be stolen. Their best chance of stopping the theft is splitting up, but with a powerful enemy lurking in the shadows, can Emma and Colin cheat death and be reunited a second time?

An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World To Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout, critically acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey–based Ziskind family. Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy, now spends his days writing...

In April 1945, the Nazis, reeling and near defeat, frantically work to hide the huge store of art treasures that Hitler has looted from Europe. Truck convoys loaded with the cultural wealth of the Western world pour in an unending stream into the compound of the vast Altaussee salt mine high in the Austrian Alps. But with the Allies closing in, the vaunted efficiency of the Nazis has broken down. At Altaussee, all is tumult and confusion. In the commotion,...